Iran Election

Following the sham elections in Iran, in which incumbent Hassan Rouhani was selected to serve a second term, protests broke out across Iran but spread all across the world, including to Canada.

The protests, held in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Vancouver, denounced the sham elections and called out the Iranian Regime for its ongoing human rights violations.

Demonstrators outside the Ottawa Parliament Building, at Mel Lastman Square in Toronto, in Montreal’s City Centre and outside Vancouver’s Art Gallery, held banners which highlighted both the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Regime and their bastardising of the democratic process, including:

• "Stop Executions in Iran"

• "No to Sham Election"

• "No to Rouhani, imposter"

• "No to Raisi, mass killer of 1988"

• "Our vote is regime change"

• "Free all political prisoners"

• "This is a selection, not an election."

A graduate student, who helped to organise the demonstration, said: "The Iranian political system is not democratic, and today's election was neither free nor fair."

Indeed, Iran is a dictatorship which wraps itself in the cloak of democracy, ruled absolutely by the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. He is the most powerful of four ruling institutions in Iran, and he is unelected, chosen instead by the Council of Guardians, whom he appoints.

The main candidates in the election included Rouhani who has executed close to 4,000 people in the past four years and Ebrahim Raisi, a close friend of Khamenei’s and the choice of the Iranian terror squad, the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), who was on the 1988 Death Commissions that sent 30,000 political prisoners to their deaths.As a result, many Iranians heeded the advice of the Iranian Resistance to boycott the election, rather than take part in a façade of democracy.

The Toronto demonstration received a great deal of media and social media attention. One of the organisers, spoke to CTV, a Canadian broadcaster, and said: "Today, our simultaneous protests in Canada over Iran's elections is in solidarity with the Iranian people. The people of Iran deserve a democratic change. They rejected 38 years of this tyrannical rule."While, a senior at the York University of Toronto expressed that there are many issues currently plaguing the Iranian people, including a lack of human rights protections specifically relating to freedom of speech and women’s rights. He also highlighted Iran’s state-sponsored terrorism and their failing economy.

Hassan Mahmoudi, a human rights advocate, wrote an article about the protests for American Thinker in which he applauded the protesters for their bravery.

Another broadcaster, CBC, interviewed Shahnaz Fallah from the International Coalition of Women against Fundamentalism (ICWAF) about the elections.